The Integratron, Landers (1953–1978) The Integratron is an octagonal, minimalist style white building located just outside the desert in Joshua Tree. The oak-lined upstairs is now used for New Age sound baths and meditations. Yet in the first floor, visitors are able to learn about the building’s unusual history. The Integratron was built between […]
What on earth do these mannequins have to do with Persepolis?
Image depicts the interior of the former U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Iran. Photo by William Brangham, PBS NewsHour, 2015. The U.S. embassy in Tehran, Iran, has been closed since April 7, 1980. The building remains open to the public as an eerie quasi-museum with anti-American murals, cases showing supposed surveillance equipment collected by the CIA, […]
Why on earth do we think about unicorns when there are no unicorns to think about?
This article features the work of University of Texas at Austin Philosophy Professor Mark Sainsbury. The image is by artist Yelena Bryksenkova and reproduced here courtesy of Oxford University Press. It’s 25 minutes until your shift ends, but you have finished all the work you needed to do for the day. You click through your personal emails, […]
Why on earth would a 19th-century poet collect human hair in a scrapbook?
One of the most popular objects housed at the University of Texas at Austin’s archive the Harry Ransom Center is a nineteenth-century scrapbook of human hair. If you open the book, you can see some strands clipped from the heads of George Washington and Napoleon, the appropriately lush auburn tresses of the great Romantic poet […]
At first glance, this cowboy comic seems like it belongs on a refrigerator, not preserved in a research library. This is no ordinary eight-year-old’s picture. The creator was none other than Kazuo Ishiguro, the 2016 Nobel Laureate in Literature. Known for complex novels about the ethics of technological progress and the uncertainty of cultural memory, […]